Monday, April 16, 2012

[Before I begin, I'd like to remind everyone of our IRC channel, which is #xkcd-sucks on Foonetic and is where all the interesting people from here hang out and the only reason I still update this place. Come for the fat jokes, stay for the verbal abuse. -Ed.]

1041. I'd comment on the actual quality of this strip but when I went to open it to write this review all I could notice is DEAR GOD WHAT IS ON THAT MAN'S FACE???

1042. I always like when Randy does these "I wish I were A Softer World" comics because it really drives home why I like ASW and don't like XKCD. At least he gets the three panel format right this time (he never does) but he still manages to fuck up the pacing, mostly by being too damn verbose. He could kill the text in the first panel and just make the text read "I will never have with anyone / what I had with you / thank God" and that would work better. (Still not great, but let's be fair, nobody thinks Randy is capable of great.)

1043. What always bothers me about these comics is that I can't help the feeling that Randy genuinely believes that Google Trends are a good way to predict the future (or the state of the world as it stands right now, etc.). There are people like that out there, and Randy seems to be affiliating himself with them. Incidentally, why did he include Wordpress and Livejournal? They have no bearing on the joke, and aren't relevant to his chart, either.

RECURSION - it works, bitches! (&quot;bitches&quot; being like &quot;niggers&quot; in that if you like black guys / women then it&#39;s totally cool to refer to people that way)April 16, 2012 at 1:21 PM

That place has changed a lot. It used to be a platform for smart free-thinkers mastering the fine art of irony, double-entendre and play-on-words. I remember arguing in ancient greek with Marion Delgado about a citation from Xenophon and drawing marxist leninist cadavre exquis with Gamer.

Comic 1043 also implies that google trends are the same as life. So whatever is most popularly searched for is what everyone is doing? I'm pretty sure breathing was less popular than Kony for a while, but the people who were searching for the man didn't all suffocate.

I would really like it if Megan had renamed herself "Megane." But her family still didn't have her committed until she accidentally told her sister: "You know, I haven't kept in touch with Randall and now I think that's a mistake."

When i took calcium tablets and drank buckets of water i found about 6 months later my nails stopped chipping. My nails are naturally ULTRA thin, they are almost see through, and they never get long. But this helped. It took 6 months to see a difference because the nail bed had to grow to the edges to see a difference.Also, don't be rough or handle things, working in retail, the coins and cash register- forget growing nails! The month my sister stopped working in retail her nails grew insanely.That's my advice

I think xkcd is the best because of its innovation: roll-over text to provide a second punchline to each strip, online forums for fans to discuss the strip or whatever else, and perhaps most of all, the real world meet-ups between fans. I am simply unaware of a single comic EVER that has inspired so many Live Action events (comic BOOKS sure, but a daily or weekly strip? No way.) Personally, I prefer continuing storyline strips (Girls With Sling Shots, Questionable Content, Legend of Bill.) But xkcd uses the internet to actually transform the way readers experience the comic: it's not just a funny or edgy strip scanned and posted. xkcd has really created something different, which is why I rank it "The Best" of the past decade.

Why is it that Jews identify with the Holocaust? Mengele kept a house of dwarves but you don't find little people talking about the Ovitz family all the time. Faggots don't talk about their Arsewitz (excepting that son-of-an-Aspie-milker Cohen) and gypsies, well, they keep on moving.

There are only 15 million Jews on the planet. That's, like, less than one Australia, and they're not whining endlessly about how they're one massive ex-prison-colony. Fuck, Jews, get your shit together and move on.

However, the Australian aborigines do continue to whine endlessly about how they were culturally oppressed and had their land stolen from them and they don't want to get white man jobs and live white man lives because their great great great great great great etc. grandparents lived in a different way in tribal societies. How do those two population sizes compare?

1041. The genius of Randall Munroe shines forth yet again. By begining with a cliché with which we're all familiar, only to have the character continue his speech in such a way as to make clear that his meaning is quite different from what one would expect, he acheives a masterly subversion.The "whites of their eyes" tactic is obsolete in the age of missiles and high-powered rifles, so the comic also confronts the reader with the fact that closeness has become synonymous with compassion but it was not always thus. This sort of profound commentary is what makes xkcd stand out when it chooses to engage in it.

1042. This comic is well timed: to follow up a subversion where aggression is supplanted by compassion, he gives us a comic where things are the other way round!The reflection on the water's surface is also pretty while remaining consistent with Randall's minimalist art style. The fact that a star-lit sky is in the reflection but not the scene which it is a reflection of provides a point of contemplation for the reader: can we lose sight of the subtle beauty of our world when our focus is too direct?

1043. Randall presents us with an interesting observation: it seems that blogging will shortly be superseded in popularity by the use of tumblr! His comments remind us that in the not-so-distant past blogging was an obscure medium of communication which the mainstream media did not take seriously. While the alt-text is a scathing analysis of tumblr as it is now, his cheerful delivery reassures us that if tumblr does indeed become the new way to blog it will simply mark the end of one age and the start of another.The inclusion of livejournal and wordpress on the graph are a nice way to demonstrate that the popularity of blogging platforms is relative, and yet tumblr is still popular!

I checked the forum and found this link. Really stupid basis for a comic. It's frigging Mad Magazine.

Oddly, nobody at the forum seems to realise Charlie Bucket was chosen for being an impoverished and unassuming character, as opposed to Burns being rich and entitled. They seem to believe it's just a random alteration. I thought xkcd fans fancied themselves as being pretty smart?

Just when last week's "Why is this a comic" xkcdsucks was so lame, Randall comes up with 1044.No I've come to the conclusion that Rob ain't just fat, but can actually predict the future better than Google trends: the post actually applied to 1044, thrice.

i mean obv this made no sense from the start cos I'm not american and because i think of the BOOK Charlie & the chocolate factory rather than the film versions like a philistine (jk, adaptation is often a marvellous thing, etc)

but i don't get why it says 'like there's even a difference' when there's no possibility that anyone reading it wouldn't be able to tell the difference. is the comic trying to distract attention from that fact by bold-facedly preemptively denying it? like Ann points out, that backfires badly.

i think I begin to see the reason behind the personality cult thing that has baffled me for so long. fans talk about 'Randall' and interpret every update as if it was made by a small child they want to encourage because, bless, he's only 3, you can't expect him not to colour outside the lines and eat his crayons, and that winds me up no end, but it's the only way to do this and not have to face up to the fact that you are a fan of something terrible. if you look at a comic like this as a comic, it's appalling and offensive in its stupidity, but if you 'love' 'Randall' then you make asinine defensive statements like 'he can draw what he wants' and scrabble for convoluted ways to make sense of it, none of which there's any evidence for. meanwhile, the kid is none the wiser, and proceeds to scribble on the walls and break all your nice things.

tl;dr every single time you think xkcd can't get any worse, it gets worse. this one is vomit that's been left in a warm place for a week. but there has to come a nadir at some point doesn't there. i look forward to it.

ps if all the interesting people are on your IRC wossname then why risk encouraging those of us who are just annoying to ruin it for you

While neither of them are great orators, it's depressing that passionate sincerity is mocked while Western elected leaders deliver only carefully engineered insipid lies. It's become cool for you beaten dogs to lap up whatever shit you're thrown and beg for more.

Also most people who cheered Gadaffi's passing seemed to have the impression he a logorrheic Saddam with plastic surgery, when in fact he was an annoying reminder that Arab socialism worked and had an annoying habit of sponsoring the terrorists America didn't like rather than the ones they did. I look forward to the next American revolution to see how well insurgents are treated as shit gets real.

And this is the only time I'll post anything heartfelt on this blog, I promise.

Regarding 1043, nobody is searching Google for "blog recipes " or "blog babies" or "blog baby recipes" anymore because a generic search for "baby" or "recipe" yields plenty of blog results. Tumblr doesn't necessarily show up high in the results with a simple search term (probably because Tumblr doesn't really have much in the way of text that Google can index). Hence, if you want Tumblr results you've got to add it as a specific search term. Blogs decline in Google trends popularity has more to do with Google users knowing how to search efficiently for what they want than it does with an actual decline in the popularity of traditional blogs and a rise in popularity of Tumblr.

You state that Gary Johnson is one of the sanest politicians in the USA. While I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment, without quantification, the only thing that the statement really says with any accuracy is that there is at least one politician that is less sane than Gary Johnson. Mathematically speaking, if 0 represents the least sane politician, G represents Gary Johnson, and 1 represents the most sane politician: 0 < G <= 1. It doesn't tell us where upon the graph he should be placed, just that it isn't at the origin.

I just thought "I just thought 'I just thought "I just thought 'I just thought "I just thought I'd come here and point out that Rob is fat" and point out that Rob is fat' and point out that Rob is fat" and point out that Rob is fat' and point out that Rob is fat" and point out that Rob is fat.

1041. "I'd comment on the actual quality of this strip [which is what the readers of this blog expect from me but who cares]" Oh c'mon, you are not even trying anymore.

I was indifferent about 1042, kinda boring. So whatever.

1043. "What always bothers me about these comics is that I can't help the feeling that Randy genuinely believes that Google Trends are a good way to predict the future." Oh please, that would be silly. I just take it like 'hehe, did you notice that tumblr is on its way to become more trendy than blogs?'; doesn't really mean anything and that whole tumblr [whatever that is] vs blog -thing seems like some kind of a logical fallacy anyway.

*Ahem* I am forced to retract my earlier statements about Google Trends after it turns out that Hiprank singlehandedly proved that blogs are better than tumblr. Obviously this silly website is a far better tool for predicting the future than Google Trends will ever be.

All that was really done there was that he wrote within a second gimmick. A character limit is a writing gimmick. Reverse alphabetical order is another gimmick. The line of writing crafted withing these gimmicks, however, was of no particular interest beyond a bit of inane self-referentiality.

The potential of a gimmick's constraints to produce amazing writing was the comic's proposal. That potential was not demonstrated. Possibly, quite probably, gimmickry is the apex of xkcd's artistic sensibility.

wrote writing writing within within was was was these there the that that self second reverse referentiality really particular order of of of no line limit is is interest inane however he gimmicks gimmick gimmick gimmick done crafted character bit beyond another alphabetical all all all all a

Now? Just kill me, John. I don't have the courage to do it myself. I've always been a coward, can't face my responsibilities. I wanna die, but what that really means is, I wanna live. Badly. Be bold and forget about shit.

What the hell is this?

Welcome. This is a website called XKCD SUCKS which is about the webcomic xkcd and why we think it sucks. My name is Carl and I used to write about it all the time, then I stopped because I went insane, and now other people write about it all the time. I forget their names. The posts still seem to be coming regularly, but many of the structural elements - like all the stuff in this lefthand pane - are a bit outdated. What can I say? Insane, etc.

I started this site because it had been clear to me for a while that xkcd is no longer a great webcomic (though it once was). Alas, many of its fans are too caught up in the faux-nerd culture that xkcd is a part of, and can't bring themselves to admit that the comic, at this point, is terrible. While I still like a new comic on occasion, I feel that more and more of them need the Iron Finger of Mockery knowingly pointed at them. This used to be called "XKCD: Overrated", but then it fell from just being overrated to being just horrible. Thus, xkcd sucks.

Here is a comic about me that Ann made. It is my favorite thing in the world.

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